Echoes from the Death of Roland

Bremen Roland : Statue of Roland
in the market square of Bremen, Germany

Dream of the Dead Airman

James Hart

For nearly sixty dark unhallowed years

only my bones draped my empty distance

in sarcophagus of cargo and its broken gears,

dog-tagged in wreckage I once knew as France,

my name enduring slow particle bombardments

of long compression into forgetful foreign soil,

and one ghost in my memory’s machine haunts

me always, roiling smoke and glaring flaring oil.

At last I’m wrapped in time’s unflagging glory

and carried across my homeland’s common field

to rest to Taps and muted eulogies as they bury

me now in Ozarks like Arcadia, my fate revealed

among remembered hills like echoes of a long ago

where soldier ghosts and poets sang of Roncevaux.

(Poem from an unpublished manuscript

entitled Somewhere West of Never)

Bremen Roland is a famous statue of Roland in the market square, or Rathausplatz, of Bremen, Germany. Roland was a knight of the first Holy Roman Emperor Charlemagne, and a hero of the Battle of Roncevaux Pass, in which he died. Roland became a paladin of Charlemagne’s court, one of twelve warriors found in French literature’s Matter of France.

Roland stands in the center of the town, next to the town hall and the city cathedral. The statue depicts Roland as the protector of the city, as he valiantly holds a sword and a shield with the two-headed Imperial eagle, a symbol of Germany. The shield is inscribed with a declaration translating to: “I manifest your freedom, as granted to this city by Charlemagne and many other rulers. For this, be thankful to God, that is my counsel.”

The Bremen Roland statue is a symbol for freedom and market rights, thus his location is adjacent to the marketplace. 

Battle Monument - Roncevaux

If Night Were a Black Goddess Named Cathedral

Venus of Willendorf - ca. 24000 BC

The Venus of Willendorf, now known in academia as the Woman of Willendorf, is an 11 cm (4.3 in) high statuette of a female figure estimated to have been made between 24,000 and 22,000 BCE. It was found in 1908 by a workman named Johann Veran (or Josef Veram) during excavations conducted by archaeologists Josef Szombathy, Hugo Obermaier and Josef Bayer at apaleolithic site near Willendorf, a village in Lower Austria near the city of Krems. It is carved from an oolitic limestone that is not local to the area, and tinted with red ochre. The "Venus of Willendorf" is now in the Naturhistorisches Museum in Vienna, Austria.

Several similar statuettes and other forms of art have been discovered, and they are collectively referred to as Venus figurines, although they pre-date the mythological figure of Venus by millennia. -Wikipedia

Thoughts on Naming

a Black Woman Cathedral,

the Goddess of Willendorf,

and the Primeval Mother

James Hart

Her soul will be your soul, your rose windows

in the dawns you call your eyes, opening slow

and following days’ specters assembling sunlight,

saints and martyrs on the western front of night.

She needs no edifice more ponderous than clouds,

a canyon landscape for a nave will do, and floods

of starlight stippling night’s ancient slated dome,

stone penitents draped in veils in her votive home.

And for her icon, carve your own paleolithic Venus

like Our Lady of Lespugue, ivory idol of pendulous

breasts, mounded belly full with child, hips ample

enough for lands to drift upon, oceans flow to pull

of moonlight in her prayers, her labor’s rhythms

in dithyrambic wind, heft of heaven’s natal hymns.

(Poem from an unpublished manuscript

entitled Somewhere West of Never)

Venus of Lespugue - ca. 24000 BC

Memories from a Town Time Left Behind

Urban Abadonment - Detroit

The house situation

referred to in the poem

is actually in far worse

condition than this house

from Detroit's urban blight.

Premonitions of

Sunlight and Sorrow

James Hart

A brooding mood, I stop for a moment to stare

at my ancient neighbor’s abandoned house,

the one beyond it vacant as well but less neglected.

For a moment I’m struck by premonitions of emptiness,

shiver and shadow palpable in the autumn shade.

To awaken some year far away from now

and know I’m the final resident in my block,

the whole town vacated by an overnight mystery,

I’d ask myself how such dread losses occurred:

Alien encounters? Angels of doom? Elder gods

personified, threading vanishing skeins of fate?

Like children of time playing aimless games of tag,

clouds skip fragmented shadows over dimming sky,

sunlight and sorrow paint transparent weathers

across clapboard walls.  In the cool evening air

smells of damp and decay pervade the breeze.

Another statistic for Alzheimer’s malign triumph

over memory, laughter, the old man left this house,

powerless: first to go to his daughter, then into fog

where such men pass their days in deathless paradox.

Not even raccoons in the attic made him hire repairs;

he shared his last days here with rain, rot, ruin,

oblivious to his daughter’s or neighbors’ concerns.

I can tell you how I abhor this residential mess, fears

of fire and thieves increasing with the scattered leaves

across the lawn. And yet I wonder who would care

if we all were raptured into empty air, leaving behind

houses occupied by rank abandonment, vacant memory

shackled to his ghostly brothers, sleep and death,

fallen timbers exposed to glaring eye of sun and sky.

September 23, 2011

Room Suitable for a Tattered Ghost Revisited

Abandoned Living Room

My Mother Read Me

Sleeping Beauty

James Hart 

A poem for my mother,

Alene Wagaman Hart (1918-1990)

If I stir December’s ember fire,
I remember places where beauty lies,
my mother reading sleeping beauty
in darker language of her loving eyes:
she read I love you’s simple wisdom
to open sky and field, stone, tree, and me;
she praised rainbow’s frail iridescence,
and daily prayed for sunset’s divinity.

Recalling this sleeping beauty lost a prince,
her eyes’ wordless loss, her longing heard
among voices calling from empty rooms,
she labored to say her sorrow’s words
at the threshold where the waking day
burned lovely night’s ardent kiss away.

(Poem from an unpublished manuscript
entitled In the Countryside of the Dead)

Note: My mother died on December 2, 1990.

Photo: www.flickriver.com

An Elizabethan Linen Merchant's Sign

Display in Linen Shop

At the Sign of the Piece of Linen

James Hart 

You will find fine goods,
whole bolts of pristine cloth
the pale shopkeeper will unwind
for only your appraising eyes.

He will let your fingers
feel the linen’s infinite weave,
test its strength and suppleness
to choose an immaculate length.

He will dress your somber rituals:
tablecloths for laying feasts upon,
napkins nesting communion bread,
white sheets for a virgin’s bed.

You will find fine remnants
suitable for new pillow shams,
babies’ gowns—undeniably durable
for your eternal undergarments.

At the sign of the piece of linen
you will find fine goods,
clean as the unspotted snow
that shrouds your long way home.

(Poem from an unpublished manuscript
entitled In the Countryside of the Dead)


Note on Title: I remember reading something years ago that mentioned a linen merchant in Elizabethan London who could be found "at the sign of the piece of linen." The words were "found poetry" for me, and I soon wrote this poem to take advantage of the phrase. Linen has been used for burial shrouds throughout history--most famously the Shroud of Turin.

Photo: Stacks of White Linen.

http://french-grey.com/

Linen Merchants:
A Sign from Another Time

Jewish Linen Merchant - Glasgow, Scotland

Two women outside Abraham Links' drapery shop in Main Street in the Gorbals, 1907. The top left hand window has lettering in Yiddish while the bottom right window has a similar message in English. Abraham Links (1886-1953) was a leading figure in the Zionist movement in Glasgow.

http://www.theglasgowstory.com/image.php?inum=TGSE00745

Some Wreckage from the Whaling Age

Vintage Poster for the White Star Line

Leviathans Dreaming

James Hart

Titanic, Lusitania, Bismarck,
the whales of empire
sleep the dreaming deep
where currents sweep so slow
nothing seems to move inside
time’s corrosive crusted skin.

What hulks of history we hold
our sleeping wreckage in,
Hindenburgs consumed to flashing ash,
periscope earth barely submerged among
the White Star Line’s vanishing shipwrecks,
flotsam drifting abandoned names.

Washing up on forgotten shores
of the universe, ghostly ribs and vertebrae
dream the shapes of whales, white pyres
of memories burning familiar as zeppelins
aglare in the flares of sand
where time spouts out its empty sea.

December 13, 2001

(Poem from a sequence entitled

Wreckage from the Whaling Age)

Arise, These Stones Sleeping in a Field

Stones Sleeping in a Field

The Sleepers

James Hart 

We found our valleys
full of love’s voluptuous languor,
sunlight folded among the hills,
corpulent mist drowsing in the dusk,
and left the sleepers to their sleep.

We found our bones
full of moonlight’s airy marrow,
starlight folded among the hills,
somnolent mist dreaming in the dark,
and left the sleepers to their sleep.

We felt old infinities fall
under night’s supernal pall;
we rose before the nimble dawn
and found the sleepers gone.

(Poem from an unpublished manuscript
entitled In the Countryside of the Dead)